Drive
by Go0se
Summary: Post-Dallas. Vanya was sick and crazy and broken. Allison was broken and tired and sick of being alone. So, she weaves a rumour to make her sister not-crazy anymore. They hit the road. Allison doesn't know yet if she'll regret it.


_Warnings: mentions of blood, unkind use of the word 'crazy', brief body horror that basically amounts to describing the White Violin, self-deprecating thoughts.  
-_

* * *

Allison tries her best to only think about things that are in front of her.

.-

She gets back from Vietnam with the others, and Klaus says that everything is exactly the same even though everything's broken. Allison's Luther blasts off to the goddamn fucking moon (or someplace as good as) and leaves her alone. He is crazy and broken. The others- Klaus, Diego, Five- are crazy and broken too, in their own individual ways, but she doesn't care about them. They all walk off in different directions, herself included.

Vanya is crazy and broken and helpless as a goddamn infant in a bunker under the mansion's ruins at the edge of the city, and that is where Allison goes.  
The last time Allison had seen her little sister she'd hurt her badly. She isn't sure if, or what, Vanya remembers. She still hesitates at the door for a while, but eventually climbs onto the hospital-issue bed, her arms lightly around her sister like she hadn't done almost ever before then.  
(Hargreaves had never had the time to instill 'his' 'daughters' with such ideas as sisterliness, there was training to do.)  
She lies on her sister's bed in the underground room and listens to the beep and hum and click of the many machines.

Vanya is the only other girl in her family, other than Mom. It shouldn't matter, but it does. It does matter because Allison and the others just got back from a time-travel trip to fucking Vietnam and Allison, she has blood on her hands again, but Vanya was laying here all on her own the whole time, and Allison had never learned how to relate to her in a way that older sisters should. She had never learned how to relate to anyone the way she should, and she had _tried. Her best excuse for a role model was a overly-sweet piece of silicone and plastic with a voice modulator and wheels attached to a bustle instead of legs. (How could she have expected to raise Claire, with that being all she knew? Why did she ever think she could do anything?)  
The radiation-level monitor machines make their noises. Her sister stares without seeing at the concrete ceiling; her breath sounds like choked-off sobs she sucks in through her grey-white lips. (Grey-white, but not pale; Vanya's skin isn't human enough to be pale anymore.) Underneath the thin hospital-issue nightgown, unnatural edges are obvious. Thin metal strings, stuck deep in her sister's skin, starting right above her groin and stretching up her torso, piercing again just below her throat. They are a mark of Vanya's sickness, of what's happened to her; to all of them. Even now, with Vanya asleep (but not resting), they will not disappear._

Allison is tired and sick of being alone. She feels the fabric of reality around her like untold millions of tiny threads, coming in from everywhere and bunching up around her throat. When she breathes, when she opens her mouth to speak, they pull and tauten.

She pushes herself up on one elbow and then up so she's sitting, criss-crossing her legs and pulling her skirt- the president's wife's skirt- down over her knees. Her hand reaches out at first to hold her sister's shoulder, or maybe smooth back her hair, but it's useless. She lets her palm fall to the sterile bedsheet. She swallows once to clear her throat. Her words have always been her power, and the threads around her throat tremble with them. She doesn't understand what makes her lies change the world but she has learned to trust it to understand her, to make what she wants to happen real.  
"I heard a rumour," she says to her unconscious, daydreaming sister, "That you weren't crazy anymore."

There is a soft _snap _in the air. She knows from long practice that no one else would hear it, if there were other people in the bunker to hear.

Beside her, Vanya stirs, blinks awake.  
Nothing else changes; her skin doesn't darken to its normal paleness, the bruising around her left eye doesn't disappear, and the strings that indent the thin hospital cotton covering her from collarbone to knee don't fade away. But she rolls her head on her neck toward Allison, her pupils constricting as she focuses; her mouth twists down. "You're going to kill me," she says.

And her voice, her voice is filled with resignation and deadened sadness and disgust, her voice is sane, but it's slower than Allison remembers it being. The goddamn drugs, she'd forgotten- Allison slides to her feet and walks around to the other side of the bed, peels off the hospital tape holding her sister's IV in, then takes the needle itself in between her index and pointer finger and pulls it out of Vanya's arm with only a small tugging of skin. The substance that leaks out of the tiny pinprick is too thick and black to be proper blood; Allison blots it with the sleeve of her coat, and it stops after a few seconds.

Vanya has rolled her head again so she's looking up at Allison; her eyes clear, finally, although they're no happier_._

Allison clears her throat again. "Let's go for a drive."

.-


End file.
